The Copperbelt in Theory from ..Emerging Africa" to the Ethnography of Decline
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CHAPTER ONE The Copperbelt in Theory From ..Emerging Africa" to the Ethnography of Decline Calo cesu cileya pantanshi Na 'fwe bantu tuleya pantanshi. Our country is going forward, And we the people, too. 1 Copperbelt popular song (and opening quotation to A. L. Epstein's Politics in an African Community, I9J8) Car owning remains a dream. A decade ago, young men in gainful employment were able to buy cars of all models. That era is gone, gone never to return again. Terence Musuku, "Dreams Are Made of This," Times of Zambia, July zr, r989 DREAMS ARE MADE OF THIS: "MODERN AFRICA" TODAY In the mid-I96os, everyone knew, Africa was "emerging." And no place was emerging faster or more hopefully than Zambia, the newly inde pendent nation that had previously been known as Northern Rhodesia. The initiation of large-scale copper mining in the late I920s had set off a burst of industrial development that had utterly transformed the coun try; by the time of Independence in I964, that industrial growth seemed sure to propel the new nation rapidly along the path of what was called "modernization." From being a purely rural agricultural territory at the time of its takeover by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company in the I89os, the modern nation-state of Zambia had by I969 arrived at an urban population of over I million (nearly 30 percent of the pop- I 2 Expectations of Modernity ulation), with total waged employment of over 75o,ooo (of a total pop ulation of just over 4 million) (Zambia 1973, 1:1), and a vibrant indus trial economy that made it one of the richest and most promising of the new African states. Observers from early on were stunned by the rapidity and scale of the social transformation that had taken place along the urban, indus trial "line of rail" that ran from Livingstone in the south all the way to the Copperbelt in the north (see Map 1). Within a few short years fol lowing the development of commercial copper mining, mining towns sprang up all along the Copperbelt (Map 2). European colonists settled the new towns in numbers, while "natives" came by the thousands to seek work in the mines and other new industries. Africa was having its "Industrial Revolution," thought the missionary Sandilands, at a brutal and blinding speed; the process had "something of the suddenness and ruthlessness and irresistibility, on the social plane, of what, on the mil itary plane, we have become familiar with as the German 'blitzkrieg' " (Sandilands 1948, ix). The social anthropologist J. C. Mitchell con curred: "We in Northern Rhodesia to-day are living in a revolution, the intensity of which, as far as we can judge, has not been equalled in thousands of years" (1951, 20). Already in 1941 Godfrey Wilson had sensed an epochal transfor mation: Over the heart of a poor and primitive continent civilization has laid a finger of steel; it has stirred a hundred tribes together; it has brought them new wealth, new ambitions, new knowledge, new interests, new faiths and new problems. (Wilson 1941, 9) Thirty-five years later, Robert Bates remained equally impressed: Less than a century ago, Zambia was exclusively agrarian; in the present era, it is a society dependent upon large-scale industry. Once characterized by village society, the territory that is now Zambia contains a score of cities of roo,ooo or more persons, and these cities contain over 40 percent of its population. Where but a little over fifty years ago forests once stood, there now stand copper mines; and the marketed produce from these mines makes Zambia one of the world's leading exporters of this mineral. (Bates 1976, r) There was already something a little off here. Wilson's dramatic vi sion of "small-scale society" being suddenly replaced by "large-scale" industrialism ignored both the shallowness of "the industrial revolu tion" (which was largely confined to mining) as well as the way that Africans in the region had been bound up in large-scale political struc- The Copperbelt in Theory 3 Plate r. A view of the concentrator at Luanshya. (Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines Limited, 1984 annual report) tures and long-distance trade for centuries before. Nor was wage labor so new in the 1920s and 1930s as it appeared-Africans from Northern Rhodesia had already been migrating in numbers to work in the mines in Katanga across the border with the Belgian Congo for at least twenty years, and some had gone as far as Rhodesia and South Africa even earlier (Perrings 1979, 14-23; Parpart 1983, 31-32; Meebelo 1986, 19). 4 Expectations of Modernity WESTERN ------- Provincial boundary ~~Railway ~ Copperbelt urban area Map r. Map of Zambia (Source: Daniel 1979:5) Bates's "score of cities of 1oo,ooo or more persons," meanwhile, turned out on inspection to be only five. 2 The overdramatic and exaggerated narration of the rise of industrialism and urbanism here reflected the extent to which the Zambian experience captured something in the mod ernist imagination and came not only to exemplify but to epitomize the revolution that was understood to be taking place in Africa. It was neither rapid change nor the existence of mineral wealth alone that made Zambia and its industrial core, the Copperbelt, such a good symbol of "emerging Africa." Africa, after all, had seen plenty of both in the past. Instead, it was the particular character of the social and economic transformation that captured the imagination. Zambia at its 1964 Independence was a highly urbanized nation, and newly so. The mining towns that had sprung up on the Copperbelt symbolized newness in a way that older cities could not. Here, unlike many other parts of Africa, the very idea of cities was a "modern" one.3 And "urbanization" was understood to involve not simply a movement in space but an ep ochal leap in evolutionary time. Cooper has explained: The Copperbelt in Theory 5 0 Relative size of copper production, ca. 1980 R Copper refinery 6 Open cast mine ~ Underground mine ® Mine township -Power line .l Power station =Road \ 0 5 10Miles 0 5 10 15 Kilometers Map 2. Map of Zambian Copperbelt (Adapted from Zambia Secondary School Atlas, Office of the Surveyor General, Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources [Zambia, 1983]) As Africans flocked into cities in ever greater numbers in the 1950s, the dualist approach to urbanization suggested that they were entering the main stream of history. The key word in the urban anthropology of those years was "adaptation," and studies stressed how organizations from ethnic as sociations to trade unions eased the-inevitable-movement into an urban way of life. The liberal affirmation that the African was becoming an urbanite was an affirmation of modernity. (Cooper 1983a, 12) Urbanization, then, seemed to be a teleological process, a movement toward a known end point that would be nothing less than a Western style industrial modernity. An urbanizing Africa was a modernizing one, and there was no place urbanizing faster than Zambia. What is more, the expanding mining economy that was driving the urbanization pro cess was a stereotypically industrial one, whose noisy smelting plants and sooty miners seemed to reiterate a well-known chapter in the usual narratives of the West's own rise to modernity, evoking particularly the 6 Expectations of Modernity iconic images of the early period of British industrialization. And every one knew where that had led. A certain convergence with a familiar Western model thus seemed to be no speculation; it was directly ob servable in the smokestacks that dramatically appeared on the horizon as a traveler approached the Copperbelt from the south. What was hap pening along the line of rail, as Max Gluckman and others insisted, was nothing less than "the African Industrial Revolution" (Gluckman 1961; Moore and Sandilands 1948). Until recently, this vision seemed to many a convincing and straight forwardly descriptive account of what was happening in Zambia. Throughout the 1960s and most of the 1970s, we must remember, Zam bia was not reckoned an African "basket case," but a "middle-income country," with excellent prospects for "full" industrialization and even ultimate admission to the ranks of the "developed" world. In 1969 its per capita gross domestic product (GDP) was not only one of the highest in Africa (more than three times that of Kenya, and twice that of Egypt, for instance), it was also significantly higher than that of such "up-and coming" middle-income nations as Brazil, Malaysia, South Korea, and Turkey. Indeed, with what appeared to be a rapidly rising per capita GDP of $431, it did not seem unreasonable to suppose that Zambia might soon reach the ranks of at least the poorer European nations such as Portugal, with a 1969 per capita GDP of just $568, or Spain, with $867 (United Nations 1973, 627-629). Even as late as 1979, Zambia was still being reckoned a "middle-income country," whose GNP jus tified a ranking above such countries as the Philippines, Thailand, or Egypt (World Bank 1979, 126).4 Somewhere along the way, though, "the African Industrial Revolu tion" slipped off the track. The script of Zambian "emergence" via in dustrialization and urbanization has been confounded by more than two decades of steep economic decline. According to the World Bank, per capita income in Zambia fell by more than 50 percent from 1974 to 1994 (World Bank 1996, 562). GNP per capita, meanwhile, shrunk by an average of 3.1 percent per year from 1980 to 1993, by which time the figure amounted to only $380, leaving Zambia near the bottom of the World Bank's hierarchy of "developing nations" (only 25 countries ranked lower) (World Bank 1995, 162).